User:MauraWen/sandbox Anglo Saxon craft production

Anglo-Saxon Jewellery
One can define the term 'Final Phase' as the period of time that begins at the end of the sixth century and extends into the early eighth century. This fashion era "followed the cessation of multiple brooch dress fashions and ornament in animal art of Salin Style I, and see its replacement by dress and weapon fittings decorated in Salin Style II."

"Rather simpler and smaller gold pectoral crosses have been recorder from a seventh-century female costume set at Milton Regis, Kent and as the the centerpiece of an elaborate jewelled gold necklet from the cemetery at Desborough, Northamptonshire."

St. Cuthbert was buried in late seventh century with a small garnet-set gold cross, which is similar to other jewellery recovered from furnished female graves in seventh-century cemeteries.

Kent cemeteries that span the sixth and seventh centuries provide a good representation of the change in dress fashion that take place over time. The adoption of the Frankish fashion for wearing a single jewelled disc brooch at the throat around 570 has already been mentioned. This leads to the more sophisticated plate brooches with cloissonne garnet and glass settings and then on to the elaborate composite jewelled brooches that appear to go out of fashion around the middle of the seventh century. Sometimes miniature additional brooch fittings are combined with a composite brooch such as the silver safety-pin fibula found in Grave 205 at Kingston Down.

Examples of similar safety-pin silver brooches occur at a number of sites distant from Kent. Dress pins stared to occur more regularly in female dress assemblages as the seventh century progresses, though more commonly as single pins in Kent rather than in matched pairs linked by chains found outside Kent after c.650. Pendants became fashionable, starting with disc forms and including versions setting garnets, amethysts or patterned glass. There are also necklets made up of silver-wire rings and single-coloured glass beads, occasional decorated glass beads, and in some cases imported glass beads.

Chatelaine fittings are worn suspended from the waist, often consisting of linked iron bars accompanied by iron keys, and tools such as shears, while a lidded cylindrical copper-alloy box containing thread, cloth fragments, and pins features in one or more cases in each cemetery. These so-called workboxes seem likely to have functioned as amulet or reliquary cases.

In male graves, belt sets with triangular plates imitate Frankish forms and seem to be introduced in the late sixth century and span the first half of the seventh century. Later that century, small buckles with rectangular plates become typical, and later still there are more openwork forms, again influenced by Frankish fashions.

There is a large degree of uniformity in dress fittings found across Anglo-Saxon England, though there are a few hints of regional fashion. Small annular brooches with Style II bird heads found in Linconshire and Yorkshire. Helen Geaks has emphasized, however, the Roman links in the dress fashions adopted across England, particularly the Byzantine parallels for combining linked pins with necklets made up of linked wire rings and beads. She has seen the abandonment of traditional German dress at the end of the Migration period, and the adoption of Roman fashions in the Final Phase, as a political statement. She argues that the Anglo-Saxons identified themselves as legitimate heirs by conquest to the Romans who had ruled Britain.

Pagan iconography continues into the seventh century. Triangular buckles fro Finglesham, Kent Grave 95 with its armed warrior figure in the first half of the century, or a gold pendant showing a man carrying two snakes from a mid-seventh-century necklet from the Riseely, Horton Kirby cemetery in West Kent.

Craft production: fifth to sixth centuries
"Our knowledge of craftworking between the fifth and the seventh centuries is riddled with gaps and ambiguities. This stems partly from a lack of supporting literary and epigraphic sources, but also from a dearth of workshop evidence associated with such media as glass and non-ferrous metals. We know little of the identity and careers of contemporaty artistans, although it is possible to gain some impressions of their social role from burials.

Amongst the domestic crafts, textile manufacturing is best attested by the persistent discovery of spinning and weaving implements on settlements and in graveyards. Very little archaeological evidence remaining of the crafts of wood and leather-working. The generalization can be made that most craft production at this early period proceeded at a domestic level within the sphere of self-sufficient rural communities, leaving the production of non-utilitarian goods in the hands of a relatively small contingent of itinerant specialists.

The academic consensus emerging from detailed study of migration-period brooches also favours the scenario involving periodic activity by itinerant jewellers who left their mark in localized clusters of brooches displaying family tendencies in style and design, rather than distribution from a few centralized workshops.

The Kentish royal dynasty exploited its close dynastic and commercial links with Francia during he later sixth and seventh centuries to obtain gold, garnets and other imported luxuries, which along with the Style II animal ornament, formed the ingredients for a distinctive polychrome style synonymous with Kentish aristocratic identity.

The academic consensus emerging from detailed study of migration-period brooches also favours the scenario involving periodic activity by itinerant jewellers who left their mark in localized clusters of brooches displaying family tendencies in style and design, rather than distribution from a few centralized workshops.

The Kentish royal dynasty exploited its close dynastic and commercial links with Francia during he later sixth and seventh centuries to obtain gold, garnets and other imported luxuries, which along with the Style II animal ornament, formed the ingredients for a distinctive polychrome style synonymous with Kentish aristocratic identity.

Craft production: eighth to ninth centuries
Coinciding with an eighth century boom in the economy of north-west europe, archaeological evidence of a dramatic change in the productivity of agricultural estates. This ramping up in the productive capacity of agricultural estates finds its corollary in the domain of craft production in a dramatic upturn in the manufacture of standard types of dress accessories--pins, strap-end and hooked tags--found in greatest numbers in the eastern half of England.

The centralization of resources and infrastructure at estate complexes made them natural havens for craft activity as reflected in a consistent range spanning the working of textiles, bone, wood, leather, iron and non-ferrous materials. Growth of universal artifact styles in the eighth and ninth centuries. Many standard categories of dress accessory defy localization. ONe can speak of a a distinctly 'Mercian' school of late-eight-century art characterized by a lively zoomorphic style seeon on sculpture and chip-carved metalwork, or into the ninth century, a 'Northumbrian' version of the Trewhiddle style.

Craft production: tenth to eleventh centuries
Tenth and eleventh centuries. Over this period, we encounter the beginnings of a radical shift in the location of craft production from the countryside into the urban sphere, culminating (at least in the case of larger towns) in the formation of specialized craft guilds, which were to become a standard ingredient in medieval town life.. This would effectively signal the end of the itinerant artisan. Also rural power bases, now also including a new tier of thegnly residences built on the estates of a burgeoning local aristocracy, continued to provide a setting for skilled artisans well into the twentieth century.

In terms of craft production, Flixborough in the tenth century presents a very different picture to the ninth. The manufacture of fine cloth and of cast objects in lead and non-ferrous metals disappears, to be replaced by the more workaday pairing of smithing and textile production in coarser fabrics.

The greatest contribution to understanding craft production over the Anglo-Saxon period  has been made by excavations at Coppergate in York. What was found was interdependence of craft production across the four tenements. over a forty five year period. Ferrous and non-ferrous metalworking, leather-working and wood-turning in tenements C and D, along with antler and amber working. Manufacture of leather sheaths and scabbards and smithing in C, and working and silver and copper alloy in D. Mid saxon wics